Saturday, 8 July 2017

PLOT KITCHEN, Flash Fiction, And The Future of Food

Clone 4621bx powered through the door onto the roof, the lock snapping
in two like a dry stick in a summer drought. Close behind, the menacing clatter
of footsteps echoed up the stairwell. Immediately ahead was the night: dark,
brooding and uncertain.

But for now, all being well, Captain Tansley would be there - better
be there - waiting for her and her priceless cargo. She sped across the
rooftop, the stolen case clutched tightly to her chest, her feet barely a
pitter-patter across the flat concrete floor. She scanned the moonlit sky for
signs of the hover-copter - hopeful, expectant - but all she saw was an
indifferent dome of stars.

Urgently, she broadcast into her headset microphone. Agitation fizzed up
inside her, tingling her skin like static. Where the hell is he?.. Suddenly,
a cacophony of shouts, a melee of footsteps - her pursuers had now burst
through the stairwell door.

“Over there!” one yelled, pointing right at her across the rooftop. She
spun around, her body poised precariously by the edge, the vertiginous drop
looming just beyond.

The security detail, about a dozen of them, were so massively armed that
they looked more like a single tangled mass of industrial weaponry than a
collection of individual breathing bodies. One sharply barked out orders,
another panned a searchlight across the roof - Clone 4621bx winced and shielded
her eyes.

Seedtek’s guards had her cornered.

🌿

Seedtek, cursed Clone 4621bx. The first and largest of two mega-corporations
who, over decades, had between them secured near-absolute dominance of the
world's bio-agriculture industry, grinding whole countries into dependent,
corrupted, banana republics. Huge swathes of the planet now lay under their
control, especially commandeered to produce their gene-engineered super-crops
or g-variant-livestock.

To achieve such global pre-eminence, the duopoly had manoeuvred with
guile and subterfuge - systematic bribery of regulators and extortion of
governments. Decades of unscrupulous eco-sabotage had meanwhile reduced their
rivals’ crops and seed-banks to genetic rubble - their produce too brittle, too
unreliable - especially in this era of spiralling climatic volatility. As their
competitors fell away, the duopoly had tightened their grip.

Incredible then, reflected Clone 4621bx, that in her hands - right
now - lay the key to unhinging this whole unjust system. She glanced down
at the unassuming metallic case. Oblivious to its enigmatic contents, she
nevertheless knew the responsibility bestowed on her, embracing it as the
moment she'd been training all her life for. Indeed, this was what she was manufactured
for. The Green Alliance was depending on her to succeed. For the sake of
the whole world.

🌿

It wasn't so much that she dodged the bullet. Not even the latest
classified Generation 5.0 clones could do that. But her parietal cortex had
been engineered to perceive even the slightest variations in electromagnetic
bio-architecture. She sensed the Seedtek guards tensing on their
triggers and, attuned to the vital moment when intention converts to action,
she made her move.

She accelerated precipitously along the roof-edge, a shimmering blur in
the starlight. In her wake streamed the lethal rainbow beams from their
quantum-rifles. But she was too fast, too nimble. And then it was her turn.

Still in full flight, she aimed her compact but quite devastating
quantum-pistol, and fired an array of beams into the mass of armoured bodies.
Several of them screamed as they fell to the floor, writhing in agony. Still
she kept on running and dodging, a whir of movement. Then, out of seemingly
nowhere, she sensed something hovering above her.

“Up here!” hollered a voice from the hover-copter, the curved black
triangle silently blotting out the stars above, its wing-tips raining down
deadly beams against her assailants. Captain Tansley, clad in Green Alliance
uniform, appeared at the open door - a welcoming sight, despite his dubious
timekeeping.He stretched out a hand; Clone 4621bx launched herself
towards it, their arms locking just as gravity had begun tilting her arcing
leap back towards the Earth. Captain Tansley reeled her into the craft’s dark
interior.

He snatched the metal case, and proceeded to undo its security
mechanisms using some covert Kolmogorovian-gadget he'd produced from his
pocket. Click, click, went the locks. They peered expectantly
inside.

The lid swiveled open to reveal a curious array of hundreds of minute
glass tubes, arranged on a parallel series of protruding levered metal panels.
Each tube contained what seemed to be a seed, and each was labelled with a name
scrawled in some exotic language - ‘raphinus sativus’, ‘vicia fabia’,
‘brassica oleracea var botrytis’, and such like.

Clone 4621bx turned quizzically at the captain, who began mumbling to
himself as though in a trance. “Seedtek’s primal seed collection.. Pure,
natural, unadulterated seeds.. Pristine genomes that were meant to be lost
forever.. But in our hands.. the power! Whole new lines of..”

Captain Tansley coughed, suddenly becoming aware of his own excitable
mutterings. Clone 4621bx looked on, a sudden thread of unease tugging at her
inside, a dissonance that welled up like a wave, until she finally knew something
was deeply amiss. She frantically surveyed the scene in front of her, her eyes
furiously scanning back and forth, her neural circuitry fully mobilised as she
tried to pinpoint the incongruity.

And then she saw it - Captain Tansley’s platinum ring, the smallest
detail on his left little finger, an etching barely distinguishable from the
surrounding white metal, a difference too subtle for the normal human eye, but
well within the physiological parameters of a Generation 4 clone - sheaves of
wheat unmistakably etched into the shape of an ‘A’.

Agri-CORP! gasped Clone 4621bx, Seedtek’s arch-rival. How can that
possibly be? Captain Tansley, a mole? No… Suddenly an array of images
erupted from deep inside her core memory banks. The endless training exercises.
Her Green Alliance comrades. But actually how many comrades had there
been? Like, really been? She'd been led to believe the rebellion was
vast. But all she could now recollect were the same exercises, the same
training, the same people, the same faraway forest base.

And then it dawned on her. Captain Tansley’s not a mole. Because
there was no Green Alliance. It's all been a charade, an illusion. It
wasn't just her body that had been manufactured, but her whole life narrative.
It was they who had insidiously cultivated her ecological values. It was they
who had seeded this strain of anti-establishment sentiment. All so that she
would one day risk her own life. For Agri-CORP!

‘Noooo!’ she shouted. Captain Tansley - or whoever he was - leapt up,
but her reflexes were just too damn quick. In a flash, she'd slammed the metal
case shut, and grabbing it under her arm, instinctively scissor-kicked her deceptor
in the stomach.

She whirled round and frantically fumbled at the door controls, but the
in-flight safety mechanism barred her way. To hell with this! - aiming
at the door’s edge, she unleashed a desperate but powerful kick, mustering as
much force she could from her hyper-augmented musculature. And again she
kicked. And again. And again. And again. Until its crushed frame finally prised
open.

Into the night sky she leapt, her arms splayed like a bird's wings, the
stars cast all around her. And for a moment time froze. Then the cold air
suddenly swirled all around, air sucked out from her collapsing lungs, and then
the impending rush of the ground below..

🌿

‘Green Alliance’ pondered Clone 4621bx, as she gingerly rose to
her feet. Her body felt quite sore: she might have broken a rib, she wasn't
sure. But most importantly she had the case, battered but intact. She dusted
herself down. ‘Now, that would be a good name for a rebellion..’

PLOT KITCHEN

I do not know what the future of food will look like. I do not know,
centuries on, whether we’ll be sucking up our daily calories in the form
genetically-designed nutri-shakes. Or relying on the mass cultivation of insect
farms. Or whether human existence will be reduced to a desperate foraging for
seeds or scrabbling for rats and rabbits.

You see there are just too many variables, and their interactions are
too complex - ecological, climatic, economic, cultural, social, political,
technological.

But for now, in our time, we each have to make our own choices. For what
we eat, where we obtain it, how it was produced - all have an impact.

Recent years have seen the rise of various movements - vegan,
vegetarian, slow-food, free-range, fair-trade, zero-waste, organic, eat local,
eat seasonal, eat sustainable. Each one has its own priorities, and each its
own challenges. But, at heart, each endeavours to focus our minds on food
provenance and/or the ethical or ecological consequences of our actions.

Embracing this spirit are an increasing number of food outlets popping
up all over London, like little beansprouts breaking through the urban
foodscape. Take Eat Native for instance, flying the flag for foraged
food. And then there's organic vegetarian Tiny Leaf, championing
zero-waste. But this post is about Plot- a little unassuming food
counter in Tooting's Broadway Market, serving up locally-sourced seasonal
produce - they even use local Wandsworth honey.

The food is cooked up simply and in balanced flavourful combinations. A
dish of succulent slices of seared hangar steak, full of meaty ferrous flavour,
is served with a riot of pink radish (‘raphinus sativus’), bright-green
broad beans (‘vicia fabia’), and little salty nuggets of blue Cropwell Bishop
stilton. Another dish of purple sprouting broccoli (‘brassica oleracea var
botrytis’) is dished up simply and deliciously with chilli peppers.

It’s a little place. So little, in fact, there’s literally no-where to
sit. At least not inside the restaurant, since it's basically just a
kitchen. Instead, stools are lined up in the market alley, where the hubbub of
market life - old-school greengrocers, Indian sari stalls, and Jamaican jerk
shops - jostle all around you.

On the other side of the dining counter buzzes the kitchen: it's a
ringside view of food being prepared, chopped, whisked, poured, fried,
drizzled, sizzled, sliced and boiled. You're so close up to the action, there
might as well be a splash-zone warning. But when it's luscious milk ice-cream
being whisked up under your nose - en route to being paired up with velvety
chocolate pudding - frankly who cares!

And, what's more, the friendly chefs opposite will happily chat away
with you, discussing the ingredients, explaining the processes, extolling their
love of cooking, and relating their own stories of how they got into it.

This post has been a tale of two plots: a dystopian one, where the food
is manipulated and corrupted, and its narrative disconnected and eviscerated of
meaning. And Plot, a local food venue: honest, connected, personable,
natural, and flavoursome. One’s in the future, the other’s in the present. And
I know which I'd prefer.

‘Sci-fi restaurant-reviews’ are admittedly a rather niche literary genre
- I think this might even be a first! But if you are interested in ‘flash
fiction’, especially of sci-fi, you may like the writings of my friend and
writer Dan Malakin. Not to mention
Paulo Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl, an inspiration for this post. Meanwhile, two
blogger buddies have also recently written about food and ethics - Cake + Whisky and The Swindian. Finally, Tooting Market is at threat from CrossRail 2
- here's a petitionto protect this
historic local market.

TOOTING MARKET

4 comments

Great post and this sounds like a delicious meal. I'm trying to be much more conscious about where my food comes from and how sustainable the ingredients are. However, having studied Environmental Management at Uni it can become so overwhelming with so many different ideas and thoughts on the subject. I think it's quite daunting, but day-to-day if we can make little changes we're helping. By eating at places like Plot. That's what I think anyway! Vicky

Thanks so much, Vicky! Yes, I think it can be quite a minefield sometimes - the different movements don't necessarily always pull in the same direction. But I guess if we're as mindful as we can about the ethical side of things, at least that's a step forward. It must've been interesting learning more about these things for your degree..